Borden Capalino
02 Oct - 08 Nov 2014
© Borden Capalino
Gold Rush Hush, 2014
thermal transfer, architectural moulding, dehydrated lemon peels, pistachio shells, peanut shells, enamel, pigmented resin, plasticine, caulk on canvas
221 x 160 x 7 cm / 87 x 63 x 3"
Gold Rush Hush, 2014
thermal transfer, architectural moulding, dehydrated lemon peels, pistachio shells, peanut shells, enamel, pigmented resin, plasticine, caulk on canvas
221 x 160 x 7 cm / 87 x 63 x 3"
BORDEN CAPALINO
Roses And Dreams
2 October - 8 November 2014
Buffalo Bill, the primary antagonist in the film Silence of the Lambs, kills people for their skin. More specifically, he captures, murders, and then flays large women, harvesting their dermis as he sews for himself a female body suit. As the film unfolds, it comes to light that his motive in these actions stems from having been rejected as a candidate for gender reassignment surgery. Thus his attempt to create a second skin, as it were, is his attempt to metamorphosize by other means. One of the most chilling scenes in the film depicts Buffalo Bill, painted, jeweled, and clad in his yet unfinished skin suit, dancing for himself in front of a mirror, muttering “I’d fuck me so hard”.
Capalino’s work, which has previously been described as being akin to forensic surrealism, begins as a collection process. Images from craigslist.com are compiled, collated and archived. Based on formal criteria, certain images are then selected, manipulated, dissected, and finally reassembled via a thermal transfer using a clothing iron. Afterwards they are subjected to, and adorned by a material intervention process. Shunning the art store, Capalino instead looks to the supermarket, hardware store, pharmacy, and pet store for his materials. The result is a strange marriage of photography and sculpture: photographic images are both erased and embellished with objects such as tar, coffee, iodine, dehydrated foods, freeze dried shrimp and worms, which are applied in a patterned and redactive manner.
In the past, Capalino has used images culled largely from craiglist.com furniture sales. These photographs have a set of uniform qualities: low resolution JPGs of peoples’ objects and homes, shot with minimal effort, often from numerous angles, for the purpose of secondhand commerce. They are both numbing and fascinating as they in tandem expose the ubiquity of the objects with which we surround ourselves, while providing a voyeuristic snapshot that grants visual access to people’s homes and possessions. Often they are the final vestige of a decorative construction – a domestic death mask. The overwhelming presence of floral imagery in the objects represented in these photographs leads to the simple question of why such adornment is so common. If birth, marriage and death are the occasions for which flowers themselves are most commonly commodified, what significance can be gleaned from this aesthetic agenda? The next logical step was for Capalino to explore and embrace the representational dissemination of both floral imagery and flowers themselves.
The title Roses And Dreams is borrowed from the name of a currently competing racehorse for its antiseptic anonymity. Oscillating between banality and vulgarity, it is a simple allusion to the floral imagery in the work, as well as the place of desire - fulfilled and unfulfilled - as manifest through the place of objects in our lives. Ultimately, the work in Roses And Dreams is part decorative archeology, and partly - and here we are brought back to Buffalo Bill - an urge to make dead skins dance.
Roses And Dreams
2 October - 8 November 2014
Buffalo Bill, the primary antagonist in the film Silence of the Lambs, kills people for their skin. More specifically, he captures, murders, and then flays large women, harvesting their dermis as he sews for himself a female body suit. As the film unfolds, it comes to light that his motive in these actions stems from having been rejected as a candidate for gender reassignment surgery. Thus his attempt to create a second skin, as it were, is his attempt to metamorphosize by other means. One of the most chilling scenes in the film depicts Buffalo Bill, painted, jeweled, and clad in his yet unfinished skin suit, dancing for himself in front of a mirror, muttering “I’d fuck me so hard”.
Capalino’s work, which has previously been described as being akin to forensic surrealism, begins as a collection process. Images from craigslist.com are compiled, collated and archived. Based on formal criteria, certain images are then selected, manipulated, dissected, and finally reassembled via a thermal transfer using a clothing iron. Afterwards they are subjected to, and adorned by a material intervention process. Shunning the art store, Capalino instead looks to the supermarket, hardware store, pharmacy, and pet store for his materials. The result is a strange marriage of photography and sculpture: photographic images are both erased and embellished with objects such as tar, coffee, iodine, dehydrated foods, freeze dried shrimp and worms, which are applied in a patterned and redactive manner.
In the past, Capalino has used images culled largely from craiglist.com furniture sales. These photographs have a set of uniform qualities: low resolution JPGs of peoples’ objects and homes, shot with minimal effort, often from numerous angles, for the purpose of secondhand commerce. They are both numbing and fascinating as they in tandem expose the ubiquity of the objects with which we surround ourselves, while providing a voyeuristic snapshot that grants visual access to people’s homes and possessions. Often they are the final vestige of a decorative construction – a domestic death mask. The overwhelming presence of floral imagery in the objects represented in these photographs leads to the simple question of why such adornment is so common. If birth, marriage and death are the occasions for which flowers themselves are most commonly commodified, what significance can be gleaned from this aesthetic agenda? The next logical step was for Capalino to explore and embrace the representational dissemination of both floral imagery and flowers themselves.
The title Roses And Dreams is borrowed from the name of a currently competing racehorse for its antiseptic anonymity. Oscillating between banality and vulgarity, it is a simple allusion to the floral imagery in the work, as well as the place of desire - fulfilled and unfulfilled - as manifest through the place of objects in our lives. Ultimately, the work in Roses And Dreams is part decorative archeology, and partly - and here we are brought back to Buffalo Bill - an urge to make dead skins dance.